In a message to you a couple of weeks ago I listed a number of questions to which I suggested members of the university community – faculty, staff, students – deserved an answer.

The chief ones, of course, were why the administration is not drawing on the university’s reserves to cover the temporary budget short-fall — as the legislature expects and as other SUS institutions are doing, — and why it is alone among these institutions to continue large-scale hiring while cutting existing programs.

Since I wrote, UFF-UF has been studying the university’s audited financial statement and other reports by the administration.  As a result, a number of additional questions have arisen.

First, while UF’s financial statement, certified by the state auditor general, gives the amount of unrestricted funds held by the university at the end of the fiscal year 2011 as $110 million, according to the Gainesville Sun “UF officials reported to the Board of Governors that it had $67.3 million remaining in reserves as of December.” Apparently, $42.7 million has been spent in the six months preceding the legislative session.  The administration should tell us what it deemed worthy to have nearly 40% of UF’s reserves spent on it at a time when budget problems were widely anticipated.

Second, while the administration is correct that $40.8 of the remaining funds must be held back to maintain a reserve equaling 5% of its education and general revenue operating budget, as required by law, we must ask abou the remaining $26.5 million. All we have heard is that it is “pledged for research lab upgrades, equipment purchases and other commitments”.  Again, we should be told what these commitments are and why they are so important that the reserves should go to them, rather than to cover the short-fall without resorting to the draconian cuts some programs are threatened with.

Third, under the new RCM accounting system, funds generated by tuition go in part to the President’s “strategic fund.” How much is in that fund and why can it not be used to cushion the temporary short-fall?

Fourth, the most recent RCM data from the administration shows that large amounts are held in the colleges under the headings “carry forward” and “strategic funding”. These amounts ($10.6m in CLAS, for example, $3.5m in Engineering… for a total of some $42 million across the colleges) comfortably exceed the cuts being threatened. What are these funds for and why can they not be drawn on?

Last, but perhaps most important because of the amount involved, we should be given information about the category of “restricted expendable” funds listed in the university’s financial statement.  The label suggests that these are not wholly unrestricted, as is the $110 million,  but also not wholly restricted. The amount for UF alone, excluding Shands and other “component units,”  is a whopping $540 million and is found under the informative label “other”. If even a small part of it is available to cover the short-fall, we should be told why it is not being so used.

As before, the administration’s claim that the cuts it is planning to impose are unavoidable rings hollow in the face of its refusal to provide candid answers to questions such as these.  We call on it to do so, if it wants its much-vaunted “shared governance” to retain a shred of credibility.

Sincerely,

John Biro UFF-UF president

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The College of Engineering’s “FY 2013 Budget Cuts” document lacks critical details necessary to judge the health and safety of any individual department. Engineering is not alone. Almost every budget cut proposal omits a department-level breakdown, a breakdown for which concerned parents, students, and alumni of affected units are anxiously awaiting.

We expect Provost Joe Glover would require his deans to produce publicly available, detailed reports. It is shocking that he accepts such minimalistic levels of detail for budget cut proposals. At the April faculty senate meeting, he acknowledged that these budget cuts will cause serious pain to the programs and offerings at the University of Florida.

On April 17, Florida’s Board of Governors declared, “Our Universities will continue to tap their reserves year-round in order to save course offerings, retain faculty and account for enrollment growth, among other critical demands.” President Bernie Machen has elected not to spend the University of Florida’s reserves and to instead interpret the one-time budget shortfall as recurring.

Spending of UF’s reserves is just one strategy to address these state-mandated one-time cuts. Another is by closing some of the 102 open faculty positions. If the university is in such dire financial straits, its administrators should carefully consider adjusting their hiring strategies before making permanent modifications to their colleges’ teaching, research, and services. In Florida, the university with the second-most aggressive hiring strategy in these delicate financial times is FIU. FIU has 2 open positions.

Nuri Yeralan
CISE Lead Coordinator

Dear Gator Engineering Community,

Background

On March 8, 2012, the Dean of Engineering, Dr. Cammy Abernathy, was formally requested by faculty to release her budget cut proposal and to provide sufficient college budget data by which faculty could suggest viable alternatives. The Dean refused both requests during her town hall meeting on March 12, 2012.

On Wednesday, April 11, 2012, the Dean announced and immediately began to implement a budget cut proposal. The Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) department is to be cut by 20%. This amounts to less than 2% of the College’s budget. No other department in the college is to be cut. The proposal does not disclose the sources of revenue available to the college, provides no clear justification of the specific choices made, nor an analysis of the projected impact on revenue, faculty or students. These result in fatal inadequacies.

The radical cut is to be achieved by removing all current Teaching Assistantships and staff support, except for advising. This is to be accompanied by an incoherent and arbitrary splitting and degradation of the CISE departmental faculty and their academic and research programs.

Specifically, the Dean’s proposal is to move all software-oriented Computer Engineering students (approximately 310 out of a total of 610 CISE  undergraduates; 375  out of a total of 400 masters; and 130 doctoral) from CISE to the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department. This ignores the key distinction in the departments’ missions: The CISE department focuses on achieving excellence in software-oriented education and research, while ECE’s focus is on hardware-oriented education and research.

All except one of the 61 AAU (American Association of Universities) maintain separate C(I)SE and ECE departments because of this distinction.

Today, Saturday 14, 2012, the Dean released a special announcement in an email titled “Budget.” The new release does not attempt to address the fatal inadequacies of the original proposal, but highlights a few points. Many of these points contain misrepresentations, ungrounded assumptions, or factual errors.

Dean’s Misrepresentations and GAU-CISE Corrections Key Highlights and Clarifications

Key Highlights and Clarifications

• Since 2007, the state has effected a budget cut on the college totaling $14M including this year
• Total funds to be cut plus additional resources needed to fund promotion and raises required in FY12-13: $4M
• The budget cut is permanent rather than temporary

The Florida legislature has stated explicitly that these are one-time cuts being made precisely because UF is not spending its reserves. The Preeminence Bill supported by President Machen, if passed, stands to significantly increase revenue.

• The cut must be taken from recurring funds, not one-time resources

The Florida legislature explicitly stated that these one-time cuts were made to the University of Florida based on the reserves UF currently possesses. The cuts proposed by the Dean represent a choice on the part of the College which goes against the will of the legislature.

• Although the Proposed Plan does not include an across the board cut to meet the budget cut, the restructuring of CISE and ECE is not the only measure proposed to meet the budget crisis.
  • Proposed plan also includes:
    • Reduction in EDGE payouts
    • Elimination of teaching assistant funds for EDGE courses
    • Elimination of 2 staff positions in college administration
    • Elimination of college external commitments
    • Elimination of college internal commitments
    • Reduction in support of research

Of the $4.01 million dollar budget cut, effectively $1.69 million directly originate from cuts to the CISE department, $1.52 million dollars from the College Administration, and $0.80 million dollars from fringe rate reductions. No other Engineering department is being asked to absorb any cuts.

• Non tenure faculty and staff members who may be affected by proposed plan were met with by the administration shortly after the Budget Plan announcement in the interest of transparency and openness

At least seven staff members in CISE have been contacted and told to prepare for termination on July 1st.

• No individual has been terminated or laid off or given a non-renewal of contract at this time

At least seven staff members in the CISE have been contacted and told to prepare for termination on July 1st, including critical IT Systems staff employees that manage CISE’s substantial mission-critical computer systems.

• Key considerations regarding proposed CISE restructure:
  • The undergraduate computer engineering degree is already co-administered by both departments, CISE and ECE

Undergraduate computer engineering splits into a software-oriented program (CEN) administered by the CISE and a hardware-oriented program (CEE) administered by ECE. The upper division electives and the capstone design courses clearly delineate the two programs. Roughly 75-80%  (approx. 310) of computer engineering undergraduates   are CISE majors, in the software-oriented (CEN) track.

The entire graduate CE program (approx. 375 masters and 130 PhD’s) currently belongs to the CISE department.

• The proposed restructuring allows for elimination of duplication and will allow additional clarity in the skills and career options in the various computer science and computer engineering degrees

Two graduate courses (Embedded Systems and Computer Architecture) are offered in both the CISE and ECE departments. The versions have different emphases and both versions have high enrollment. No undergraduate courses are duplicated.

During recent visits of Engineering accreditors (ABET) there were no issues reported concerning the clarity of any of these degrees. We request any student or employer – who feels there is a lack of clarity – to come forward.

• The proposal to house computer engineering in ECE is not an uncommon practice. This is already the case in other highly ranked Electrical & Computer Engineering departments, such as Georgia Tech.

We know of no example where the equivalent of CISE’s software-oriented CEN program is housed in an ECE department. At Georgia Tech, it belongs to the College of Computing, NOT to their ECE department.

Out of sixty-one AAU research institutions, thirty-one contain an ECE department. Each of these institutions also has a separate CS or CSE department.
Eight of the sixty-one AAU research institutions have a unified EECS program, while six of them champion separate ECE (hardware-oriented) and C(I)S(E) (software-oriented) divisions or labs.

• Research activities will continue in computer science related topics

The CISE department will become a teaching only department with no TAs. There will be no research activities.

Researchers chosen by the Dean will be moved to ECE, ISE (Industrial System Engineering) or BME (Biomedical Engineering).

The CISE department’s computer science research includes broad-based investigation in Computer Graphics, Intelligent Systems, Databases, Distributed Computing and Networking, Software systems, Data Mining, Human-Computer Interaction, High Performance Computing and Algorithms, which cannot be sustained in an ECE, ISE or BME department.

• Post graduate advising and undergraduates degree will not be affected

It is not clear what “Post graduate advising” means.

The CISE department will not be able to provide any serious graduate or undergraduate education without TA support and without any research activity.

Undergraduate and Graduate degrees will be seriously impacted because they will be conferred by a department that is known for awarding hardware-centric degrees.

• This proposal is still under consideration. Feedback, input and ideas are welcome, please send email to engineeringbudget@eng.ul.edu

The Dean has behaved as though the proposal is final. She has given an impossible deadline of April 18, to solicit and evaluate alternative proposals, and refused transparent disclosure of college budget information. President Machen clearly said in Thursday, April 12 senate meeting that careful deliberation of the merits of various alternatives must be considered and that there is plenty of time to do so. The correct email address is engineeringbudget@eng.ufl.edu.

Conclusions

The Dean must uphold transparency and shared governance. She must immediately cease this repetitive pattern of misrepresentation of the facts about computer science, computer engineering, CISE and ECE at UF and elsewhere. If the Gator Engineering community doubts GAU-CISE’s corrections, we strongly suggest inviting a neutral panel of international experts in these areas to evaluate the merit of the Dean’s statements versus ours.

The current CISE faculty will be severely weakened if this proposal is implemented. The inevitable result would be a drastic degradation of research and education in disciplines whose labor demand is projected to grow 3 times as fast as average (according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report), for example, computer software engineering, and computer science.

The CISE department maintains an international research reputation, and its faculty will not be content to remain in a teaching-only department or be arbitrarily transferred into other units with different quality measures, values and culture. CISE has 2 ACM, 4 IEEE, and 2 AAAS fellows, and 22% of all faculty in the College of Engineering who have received the prestigious NSF Career Award belong to the CISE department. The CISE faculty engages in substantial interdisciplinary research, the majority of which takes place in collaboration with the College of Medicine and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences within and outside UF. The CISE department accounts for less than 10% of the College cost, and has the highest revenue/cost ratio of all the departments in the College.

The planned degradation of the CISE faculty and their inevitable exodus will result in an enormous and nearly irreversible loss of revenue and reputation to both the College of Engineering and the University as a whole.

You can read Dean Abernathy’s Special Announcement here.

You can download a pdf of our response printed above here.